Arthur Graham’s Reviews > The Failure Cascade > Status Update

I drove back home, thought about nuking a Hungry-Man dinner, staying up all night writing some stupid book about a UFO cult.

Communism, said the farmer who gets paid by the government to plant corn and burn his crops for no reason.

A long time ago I was playing some game on the PlayStation 2 — it was Medal of Honor or Soldier of Fortune or Call of Duty or Fucker of Guns or something where you had to shoot a bunch of Nazis who yelled the same six German words at you. (This was back when killing Nazis was universally acceptable, which dates me somewhat.)

I lived on sweet and sour chicken back then, bought a gallon at a time from the crap takeout spot next to the Leather Daddy Safeway. I forget why we called it the Leather Daddy Safeway — I think there was a cashier who always wore assless chaps and had his significant other on a leash as he rang up groceries. I do miss those days. You won’t get that kind of service with a self-checkout line.

Vice President Jeffrey L. Dahmer gave a two-hour press conference on the latest financial meltdown, although he answered no questions and gave no details on anything about the economy. Instead, he spent the first hour talking about how to fuck the stab wounds in a corpse, and the best way to cook a severed head with only a low-watt rental apartment microwave.

Anyway — that hospital — I went in to take the piss test. I knew it was going to go south because instead of being owned by Kaiser or Beacon or some university, this place was operated by KFC. Awesome hospital food — you could get a bucket of chicken in your bed after major cardiac surgery, and they would even do a feeding tube of gravy. But for actual medical care, I had my doubts.

Someone told me you could kill bedbugs by listening to the third Stooges album at top volume, but you had to find the pressing with the original 1973 mix that Iggy did, not the bullshit David Bowie mix that is on most copies. I knew I’d end up with an entire shelf of various versions of Raw Power, and still have an extreme parasite infestation.

I never do this, the meticulous planning and pitching and plotting on index cards. I always write just to write, and then later try to make it into a book, which is probably why this entire book is 99% done and I haven’t even titled it yet.

I feel like I’ve written this same story a dozen times: “Jon rides the subway home, spends an entire weekend in isolation, trying to get laid online and/or find some meaning in life by pursuing a hopeless hobby.” And honestly, this basically happened every week for like five years of my time in New York.

I already knew this was going to fail spectacularly, but I couldn’t ignore it or walk away.